read now, cry later

Sir Elton John’s trans muse! Lea Michele’s only regret! And those Hugh Jackman rumors!

By · 10 comments · Updated on January 26, 2024
read now, cry later

Way back in the 1980s, I was the lead singer of a band that covered one of Cidny Bullens’ songs (“Jimmie, Gimme Your Love”), Cidny gamely producing the recording for us. I already knew Cidny as a singer/songwriter/guitarist who appeared on the Grease soundtrack, sang backup for Elton John, and radiated talent and style. Well, Cidny later transitioned to male and writes about his experiences in a memoir, Transelectric: My Life as a Cosmic Rock Star. And the forward is by Sir Elton John!

In his short writeup, Elton says: “I would never have known that Cidny was so troubled with who he wanted to be—his identity. That night he told me that he wanted to transition to a man, I just cried and cried and cried. I finally kind of understood Cidny at that moment. And I thought, my God, you’ve lived this incredible life. You’ve been so many different characters. You’ve dealt with so much grief and sadness. Now you’ve come through it…Bravo, Cidny.” And thanks for letting us do your song!

People who need people

Brava to Lea Michele, who scored in Broadway’s Funny Girl revival, which closed on September 3. But I hear Lea has one burning regret: She desperately wanted the original Fanny Brice, Barbra Streisand, to come see it, and, for whatever reason, Babs never bothered. I suspect that when the badly received Beanie Feldstein launched the revival, Barbra didn’t want to sit there and be irritated, and when Beanie’s replacement, Lea, got raves, she didn’t want to sit there and watch the standing ovations, lol. And I totally get it. But let’s not assume too much; Barbra did send Lea a congratulatory note after the ex-Glee star started in the role! Maybe someday they can duet on “I’m The Greatest Star”.

Her name was Lola, she was a showgirl…

More Broadway diva talk: Before Kinky Boots opened on Broadway in 2013, I asked author Harvey Fierstein about the lead character, Lola, being straight and he bristled, implying that I was being narrow minded on the subject. But moments later, openly gay star Billy Porter told me there was no way he was going to play the character straight! In his memoir last year, Fierstein admitted, “Although I adored Billy’s portrayal of Lola and we never could have developed the show without his singular talent and showmanship, it wasn’t until Wayne Brady took over the role that audiences finally listened to the character say that he preferred women and accepted him as a cross-dressing heterosexual.” Well, in August, Brady came out as pansexual! Whoops! 

Garden party

There’s a musical in the works based on John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the intricate Southern tale that features homosexuality, sex work, and mayhem. In the August reading of the show, Tony winner J. Harrison Ghee (Jerry/Daphne in Some Like it Hot) played trans icon Lady Chablis, who portrayed herself in the 1997 movie version and who wrote a memoir called Hiding My Candy: The Autobiography of the Empress of Savannah. Well, spies say that the part is now so beefed up, it could almost be called Lady Chablis: The Musical. Can’t wait to see who’ll be hiding their candy in the final stage version—and who the replacements will be! 

Meanwhile, at the cinema…

Flora and Son is a wonderfully engaging movie about a feisty, rather messy Dublin woman (Eve Hewson) connecting with an online music coach (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and finding new chords in life. The film–by John Carney (Once, Sing Street)–is that rare love story where the two leads never meet face to face (except in Flora’s vivid imagination, of course).

At a Whitby Hotel lunch for the film, I got face to face with Carney and praised him for coming up with something both edgy and sweet. “Thanks,” he said. “I don’t want to do the sweet musical where everything works out fine.” He said he cast Hewson because, “She talked about the script so well in our Zoom chats that even though I could have gotten a more experienced actress, they wouldn’t have given me what she could.” “It’s sort of like in the film,” I remarked, “where Flora ends up teaching her coach a thing or two,” and he smilingly agreed.

But I still needed some education. I asked Carney to explain the moment where Flora’s son (Oren Kinlan), a burgeoning hip hopper, raps the word “gay” in a quick phrase. As Carney explained it: “He says, ‘I’m the king of the MMA. Like Conor McGregor, only not as gay.’” The kid is boasting that he can out-macho the ultimate sports thug—McGregor is the reigning Mixed Martial Arts star–and Flora gives him a slap to bring him back down to earth.

But to bring it all back to Broadway: Is the stage version of Carney’s Sing Street ever coming? “It doesn’t look good right now,” he admitted. “People are safe. They don’t want to risk anything that they don’t know the name of.” Damn. So much for my Mike Pence musical.

Fun with dick and p*ssy

Dicks: The Musical! is an uproariously raunchy and funny retread of The Parent Trap, with Aaron Jackson and Joshua Sharp as identical twins who try to reunite their parents, as orchestrated by a very gay God. The casting is sublime, with the two leads (who wrote this thing) hilarious, Nathan Lane a riot as the dad who has a soft spot for two “sewer boys” he picked up, Megan Mullally a scream as the mom who’s vagina falls off, Megan Thee Stallion perfection as the guys’ fierce boss, and Bowen Yang fun as a sparkly deity who blesses any coupling imaginable. 

At an event at Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn, I asked Aaron Jackson about the film’s opening inscription, a sardonic message about how brave it was for the gay actors to play straight. He told me that people have asked him if it was a swipe against Bros, but it wasn’t; they were making fun of Hollywood in general and how straight actors are always so “brave” to play gay.

I also asked him what was added to the movie from the stage version they did years ago. “The brothers f*cking,” he replied, “plus there’s more prevalence of the Sewer Boys, plus the p*ssy flies out of mom’s hands.” I love my life. And you’ll worship yours if you see this guffaw-inducing Rocky Horror Picture Show in the making.

Marriage story

And finally: As you know, Tony winner Hugh Jackman and his wife, Deborra-Lee Furness, have separated after 27 years. Through the years, Hugh has at times denied the gay rumors, and other times, he’s had fun with them—though there was another time when fun wasn’t on the menu.

It was in the mid-aughts, when the murmurs were particularly rampant and Hugh was doing a press conference to promote a movie. A journalist friend reminds me that Deborra-Lee was very visibly sitting to the side, with one of their kids on her lap, the picture of family unity. “This hardly ever happens,” my pal observes. “The wife and kid never surface at a press conference. It was as if she was staring down the crowd of journalists, daring anyone to go there.” They didn’t.

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